The Constitution of a Network of Reactionary Physicists during the Republic of Weimar. The dominance of physicists from Berlin in the German Physical Society caused a controversial discussion on the statute initiated by those outside of Berlin in 1914. It could not be finished because of the outbreak of World War I. This antagonism got a political and ideological quality when only the ‘Non‐Berliners’ supported a chauvinistic appeal of German physicists in the so‐called “Krieg der Geister”. After the war this (...) development led to the constitution of a network of reactionary physicists just before the “Naturforscherversammlung” in Bad Nauheim in 1920. Its members shared a hostile attitude towards the new Republic of Weimar and were mostly chauvinistic and anti‐Semitic. Temporarily the network was able to mobilise a considerable part of German physicists for their aims. A decentralisation of the German Physical Society was put through. Considering this network we examine one of the theses of Paul Forman according to which there is a close correlation between political and scientific orientations during that time. We are able to confirm this as far as science policy is concerned. There a bias for a certain kind of research can be found. It becomes more difficult when we investigate the influence of a political attitude on the individual research. We succeed in those cases where the modern theories are involved. (shrink)

Science entails history writing: scientists are continuously engaged in creating “imagined pasts” for their own specialisms, both on the small scale of the ubiquitous literature review and on a much broader scale. This aspect of science has been considered in very different ways in decades-old, yet largely neglected, contributions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Augustine Brannigan, and Simon Schaffer. Inspired by these pieces and by the missing dialogue between them, this essay argues that their concealment is itself an instance, on the (...) broadest possible scale, of the power of “imagined pasts”—in this case the imagined continuity, inscribed in the very name of our discipline, between Isaac Newton and ourselves. (shrink)

According to the conventionalist doctrine of space elaborated by the French philosopher-scientist Henri Poincaré in the 1890s, the geometry of physical space is a matter of definition, not of fact. Poincaré’s Hertz-inspired view of the role of hypothesis in science guided his interpretation of the theory of relativity (1905), which he found to be in violation of the axiom of free mobility of invariable solids. In a quixotic effort to save the Euclidean geometry that relied on this axiom, Poincaré extended (...) the purview of his doctrine of space to cover both space and time. The centerpiece of this new doctrine is what he called the ‘‘principle of physical relativity,’’ which holds the laws of mechanics to be covariant with respect to a certain group of transformations. For Poincaré, the invariance group of classical mechanics defined physical space and time (Galilei spacetime), but he admitted that one could also define physical space and time in virtue of the invariance group of relativistic mechanics (Minkowski spacetime). Either way, physical space and time are the result of a convention. (shrink)

Die Fin de Siècle‐These. Der Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen John Heilbrons Argumentation, die Physiker des ‘fin de siecle’ hätten Bild und Substanz ihrer Disziplin kulturellen Belangen angepasst, und Paul Formans Interpretation der Akausalität in der Weimarer Periode. Ergänzend zu ihrer Fokussierung auf Repräsentationen anstelle von Wahrheit, legten die von Heilbron benannten Anhänger “deskriptionistischer” Epistemologien den Schwerpunkt auf Methodik, statistische anstelle kausaler Erklärungen, historisches Verständnis von Epistemologie und unterstrichen die Beziehungen zwischen der Physik und anderen Disziplinen. Ihre Perspektive liefert einen (...) intellektuellen Kontext – innerhalb der Disziplin Physik – für zumindestens einen Teil dessen, was Forman als Kapitulation vor einer feindlichen sozialen Umgebung, wie sie sich in Oswald Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlandes ausdrückte, beschrieben hat.The Fin de Siècle Thesis. This paper examines the relations between John Heilbron's argument that fin de siècle physicists adjusted the image and substance of their discipline to cultural concerns, and Paul Forman's approach to acausality in the Weimar period. In addition to their focus on representation rather than truth, adherents of the “descriptionist” epistemologies that Heilbron identified also promoted an emphasis on method, statistical rather than causal explanations, historical understandings of epistemology, and stressed the relations between physics and other disciplines. Their views provide an intellectual context – within the physics discipline – for at least some part of what Forman had described as a capitulation to the hostile social environment expressed in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 42, Issue 4, Page 281-289, December 2019.